The movement known as neorealism lasted seven years, generated only
twenty-one films, failed at the box office, and fell short of its
didactic and aesthetic aspirations. Yet it exerted such a profound
influence on Italian cinema that all the best postwar directors had to
come to terms with it, whether in seeming imitation (the early Olmi), in
commercial exploitation (the middle Comencini) or in ostensible
rejection (the recent Tavianis). Despite the reactionary pressures of
the marketplace and the highly personalized visions of Fellini,
Antonioni. And Visconti, Italian cinema has maintained its moral
commitment to use the medium in socially responsible ways--if not to
change the world, as the first neorealists hoped, then at least to move
filmgoers to face the pressing economic, political, and human problems
in their midst. From Rossellini's Open City (1945) to the Taviani
brothers' Night of the Shooting Stars (1982). The author does close
readings of seventeen films that tell the story of neorealism's evolving
influence on Italian postwar cinematic expression.
Other films discussed are De Sica's Bicycle Thief and Umberto D. De
Santis's Bitter Rice, Comencini's Bread, Love, and Fantasy,
Fellini's La strada, Visconti's Senso, Antonioni's Red Desert,
Olmi's Il Posto, Germi's Seduced and Abandoned, Pasolini's
Teorema, Petri's Investigation of a Citizen above Suspicion,
Bertolucci's The Conformist, Rosi's Christ Stopped at Eboli, and
Wertmuller's Love and Anarchy, Scola's We All Loved Each Other So
Much provides the occasion for the author's own retrospective
consideration of how Italian cinema has fulfilled, or disappointed, the
promise of neorealism.
